Between ObamaCare, Iran and last quarter's uptick in U.S. economic growth, taxpayers these days may be distracted from several dangers to come. But households from the United States to Europe and Japan may soon face fiscal shocks worse than any market crash. The White House and New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio aren't the only ones calling for higher taxes (especially on the wealthy), as voices from the International Monetary Fund to billionaire investor Bill Gross increasingly make the case too.

In his November investment commentary for bond giant Pimco, Mr. Gross asks the "Scrooge McDucks of the world" to accept higher personal income taxes and to stop expecting capital to be taxed at lower rates than labor. ...

Between 2008 and 2012, several of the developed world's most fiscally challenged nations (including the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain) increased top personal income tax rates by an average of 8%. In the United States, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts pushed the highest federal income tax bracket to 39.6% from 35%.

What the IMF calls "revenue-maximizing top income tax rates" may be a good indication of how much further those rates could rise: As the IMF calculates, the average revenue-maximizing rate for the main Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries is around 60%, way above existing levels.

For the U.S., it is 56% to 71%—far more than the current 45% paid in federal, state and local taxes by those in the top tax bracket. The IMF singles out the U.S. as the country where raising top rates toward 70% (where they were before the Reagan tax cuts) would yield the most revenue—around 1.25% of GDP. And with a chilling candor, the IMF admits that its revenue-maximizing approach takes no account of the well-being of top earners (or their businesses).

Taxes can rise in ways both prominent and subtle. In the United Kingdom, the highly advantageous "resident non-domiciled" status—requiring wealthy residents to pay taxes on overseas earnings only if they "remit" the money to the U.K.—has become much harder to qualify for and more costly after recent reforms.

In France, President François Hollande finally managed to pass a 75% tax on income above one million euros ... As for the uniquely French "impôt sur la fortune," taxing those with a net worth above 1.3 million euros, it is alive and well. Japan too is taking steps to increase personal taxation ...

Of course these measures won't return the world's top economies to sustainable levels of debt. That could be achieved only through significant economic growth (the good way) or, as the IMF puts it, "by repudiating public debt or inflating it away" (the bad way).

In October the IMF floated a bold idea that didn't get the attention it deserved: lowering sovereign debt levels through a one-off tax on private wealth.

As applied to the euro zone, the IMF claims that a 10% levy on households' positive net worth would bring public debt levels back to pre-financial crisis levels. ...

From New York to London, Paris and beyond, powerful economic players are deciding that with an ever-deteriorating global fiscal outlook, conventional levels and methods of taxation will no longer suffice. That makes weapons of mass wealth destruction—such as the IMF's one-off capital levy, Cyprus's bank deposit confiscation, or outright sovereign defaults—likelier by the day.

I'm sorry. But you apparently didn't read the article very well. Any Good Communist knows the first step in taking over a society is take over health care.So all you guys hanging around the streets don't need jobs, just stay home, do nothing, become nothing of yourselves, Obama in true dictator fashion will take care of you by giving you a 1000.00 a month, and meanwhile we will enjoy our lifestyles of the rich and famous by means of stolen tax dollarsThe bulk of Americans Don't Care About these Leeches, nor should we, if they don't want to bother working, why should we care!. .

What about stupid, lazy wackos who are unemployable because they spend all of their time on the Internet waiting for Affirmative Action to come to their assistance? Isn’t it their Constitutional right, set fourth by this administration after voting for a communist who has been wiping his behind with the Constitution for the last 5 years. But since when us anyone worried about the Constitution since their messiah has been their leader?

Somehow I don't see the problem being resolved any time soon, and definitely not in time to avoid the culmination of the master plan to enslave the planet to the will of "those who know what's best for YOU" (aka The Corporate Socialists).

This IMF plan to extract a 10% personal levy on any individual on the face of the planet whose assets exceed debts, to pay off this artificial and phony debt created by the central bankers of the world is another fiscal atrocity proposed to create a deeper pool of the hapless and helpless and hopeless, the dependents that are manufactured and needed to advance the agenda to its culmination.

The governments of the world are already colluding. You see it now in stricter banking regulation and the elimination of tax havens. There is nowhere to legally hide, unless you are fabulously wealthy, like Romney or Soros.

The Davos Men and the Aspen Conference people are already talking about concepts that apportion a piece of government debt to each person so that, for example, if an American wanted to move to Switzerland, he would first have to cash out of the United States by paying the government his portion of the debt.

Call it an exit tax. Given the rampant lawlessness of governments at all levels here in the US, I can see this happening at the state level.

Canardo, you really ARE a dirty Communist dog. So are all the other Assachussetsians who make their vile assertions all over the blogosphere, in the enemedia, in Congress, in the White House and now --- the VATICAN.

Once you get your Peasantocracy, you -- and all the rest of us -- including the peasants -- will wish we'd never been born.

Thanks to the kind of thinking you espouse, you will have succeeded in making HELL on EARTH the fires of which no one will EVER be able to extinguish.

AOW: Interesting that the new mayor of NYC would own two million dollar homes and pays less than the going property tax rate for them. If he's a dyed-in-the-wool leftist screamer (Sandanista style) them it's likely he's well-connected to the powerful in-crowd leftist clique that rules the world from the corporate boardrooms with a revolving door into the innards of the government in most countries of the world. He sounds like a corporate socialist in the model of a David Rockefeller or George Soros.

Comes the "shockah" for Ducky: Since there remains no such thing as a "free market" anywhere on the planet, only the massively manipulated markets where trillions of manufactured phony money move any market anywhere in the direction "their hearts desire" it's the central banks of the world and the Bank of International Settlements, that are so-called Kapital today, and they're your type, I guess, promoting corporate socialism, to make the pill of absolute control over every aspect of human life on Earth easier to swallow, if you distract enough eyes away from what the hell is really happening in this world by blaming another for the actions which you are doing yourself (a ploy of the communists from the days of Lenin).

Very sadly, what you have said in your last post is as close to the truth as we ordinary mortals will ever be able to know.

Harold is no slouch either.

This IS becoming a "PRISON PLANET" more quickly than any of us ever dreamed possible, though we now know the plans have been in the works for at least a century.

That's what INTERNATIONALISM has done. The formation of the UN, which we so innocently embraced as little children in 1952, when the big building on New York's East River was brand new, was one of the greatest EVILS ever perpetrated on humanity.

Thanks to TECHNOLOGY it will be physically impossible for any of us ever to escape to ANYWHERE since every corner of the globe -- no matter how remote -- will be charted, monitored, and accessible to any invading force who wishes to capture any pathetic refugee who tries to escape Big Brother.

We are not quite there yet, but I am reasonably certain that all infants born in hospitals or attended by "official" medics of any kind, will have a MICROCHIP implanted at birth so their every future MOVE -- possibly their every THOUGHT --may be tracked.

We will become a race of State-Owned AUTOMATA who exist SOLELY for the purposes to which the STATE wants to put us.

Eventually, we will be BRED like cattle for the exclusive USE of the State. Love, marriage, family life, freedom of choice, freedom of association, freedom to move and travel at will will cease to exist;

That IS what Ducky and his ever-burgeoning crowd have been aiming at all along, though I doubt they know it. Ducky and the vast majority of DEMOCRATS, and of course the rotten RINOS, have functioned for decades as USEFUL IDIOTS in helping to implement The Master Plan.

It wont be long before most of us begin to regard DEATH as the very best friend we could ever hope to have.

Ducky, Oh my! People not spending their money the way you wish them to?

I look upon the same scene, and what I observe are corporations that have captured government so as to exempt themselves from the rules.

If our government would hang high from the gallows the likes of Jon Corzine for 'losing' other people's money, and make other financial 'wizards' responsible for the crashes they cause, instead of covering for them, much of the shenanigans would end.

Every society and market in every era had its money changers. The problem arises when they are immune from punishment and the consequences of their recklessness.

Not to worry, old chap, we'll all be equally up to our ears in marxist misery soon! Except for the elites, that is.

OWS pot smoking drum circles, sexual assault and shitting in public parks won't change that, but rather hasten it. Don't you recognize stooges when you see them?

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